About

Over the time of writing so many game reviews in my spare time, I’ve gradually changed the way they’re structured. Currently you’ll find them divided up into…

Gameplay – Do the controls work well? Is the system interesting?

Presentation – How is the story, graphics, music and sounds?

Summary – The conclusion followed by a bulleted list of good and bad points.

If it says “Time Completed” then it means the number of hours I spent on the game to finish the main story or quests.As for the product reviews, studying software engineering meant that I’ve been told how important it is to pay attention to detail and be very specific about them – Not everyone’s idea of “slow” is the same after all for example.

In any case, I hope the content will be interesting for you and you’ll come back often!

A Bit of History

It all started when I first began blogging about video games as a hobby via the free Blogspot service back in 2006 because it meant there wasn’t any of the restrictions forums have and there is generally no obligation to keep to a theme or schedule as if you were maintaining a full scale website. My intention was to share my thoughts about them as with most other blogs of this kind. Not all games manage to make it to Western shores and I thought I could let people who enjoyed Japanese games know what other weird and wonderful titles they might be missing out on. One could suss out the general meaning via machine translations such as Google but not always all the details.

I then decided to move to WordPress which was again, another free but better service and began translating all the latest daily news via Japanese gaming websites such as Famitsu.com but that grew into a greater workload than I was expecting and the idea stopped short a few months later. However, it wasn’t long before I began translating again, also writing guides and reviews when Gamebrink.com invited me to work for them. Unfortunately, that site didn’t last for long due to the lack of good staff members and it was back to free blogging services for me.

From that point my blog was renamed “Yuuenchi (遊園地)”, pronounced you-en-chee in Japanese and means “theme park”. Seemed an appropriate name considering what I’m writing about which now included items I purchased overseas. The idea behind shooting pictures of my purchases and reviewing them is really to give people an idea of what the products have to offer. I buy quite a number of Japanese products but find it hard trying to find any previews of what they actually contain. The reviews on Amazon aren’t of much use since they don’t really give a detailed insight into their contents such as what kind of artwork the fan or art books contain. It could contain a whole bunch of images used as magazine ads for all I know so it’s been much of a gamble.

Eventually I went onto renting my own hosting space and domain name because I wanted to keep an archive of everything I wrote on the internet. This was difficult to do with free services because they don’t let you have direct access to your own data such as images you upload whereas with paid hosting, you have convenient FTP access to manage everything just like you would on your own computer.

Initially I decided to stay anonymous as “Xcomp” but Xcomp.com or any of the other domains were already taken. I didn’t want to use “Yuuenchi” in the name because I felt it may be hard to remember and wouldn’t work on an international scale. Since I was going to post random material anyway (sometimes), I thought why not “randomness” and ended up with Xcomprandomness.co.uk.Xcomp was an alias I came up with (is still is now) where the ‘comp’ stands for ‘computer’ and the ‘X’ represents the anonymity one can have behind a computer. Unless you’re a hacker who can tap into someone’s computer or ISP account, the user at the other end could pretty much pose to be anyone.

It wasn’t until 2010 I decided to rent another domain LHYeung.net using my real name because I thought if I was going to spend a lot of time translating and writing articles, I might as well use my real name.

These days I use my hosting space to learn new web technology skills and keeping my language skills in check by building new websites to better present and share the information and translations I produce in my spare time.

Future Plans

I don’t really have any long-term plans for LH Yeung.net at the moment but as new ideas come along, I will probably be expanding and working on new projects.